Back in the beginning, all higher education institutions were either professional schools or “ivory towers”. Town-gown relations were mostly about who had the right to punish students, and under what conditions landlords could charge students for lodging. The idea of the university as a national asset dates back only about two centuries, and as an industrial partner even more recently than that. Both of those ideas came from Germany.

But the idea of a university as an engine of regional or civic growth is a specifically American idea, going back to the Morill Act of 1862 and the creation of land-grant universities which could use “practical education” to provide skills to the masses and research specific to develop local economies. Up here in Canada, a number of universities in our western provinces were self-consciously built on similar principles. In Europe, the idea of a “third mission” (beyond teaching and research) has been on the rise for several decades, but the concept is not always used in a spatially-specific manner.

One of the most interesting higher education trends of the past couple of decades has been the increasing frequency with which institutions have tried to justify or promote their activities on grounds of being engines of “regional economies” or “regional innovators” or – in the last decade especially “regional sustainability” (in an environmental sense). And there is no doubt that institutions are a boon to their communities because they employ a lot of people on good salaries, and because they act as a local anchor tenant, propping up housing prices. But that’s not the same as saying that what they actually do in their day-to-day activities brings much local benefit. And the evidence to back up that contention is surprisingly thin.

Enter the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which has begun trying to quantify the element of local economic promotion and highlight some interesting examples of spatially-based co-operation between higher education institutions and their local regions. And today my guest is Raffaele Trapasso, a Senior Economist at the OECD who heads the that organizations Platform for the Entrepreneurship Education Collaboration and Engagement Network or EECOLE. In many respects, I think he has one of the most interesting vantage points to see how higher education in OECD countries is developing right now. In today’s episode, we range over a number of issues, the role that the UN Sustainable Development Goals in focussing collaborations, how best to formalize ties between institutions and communities, and the continuing differences between Europe and America in terms of the pattern of collaboration. This is one of my favourite topics in higher education and I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation, too.

But enough from me: let’s hear from Raffaele.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.7 | OECD and the Geography of Higher Education

Transcript

Alex Usher: Raffaele, tell us about the Geography of Higher Education project. What is it? How did the OECD get into this line of work?

Raffaele Trapasso: Thank you for the question. The geography of higher education emerges from two basic findings. The first is that there are higher education institutions everywhere scattered in most regions of the OECD. The second is that higher education policy is partially blind which contrasts with the increasing requests for impact to higher education institutions, especially in their own territorial communities. So, we’re trying to help this connection. I would also say that the work on the geography of higher education is gaining momentum because of the increasing interest towards industrial and innovation policies, which actually embed the spatial dimension. So, there is this connection with higher education. The OECD is ideally located to imagine and design innovative policy solutions that cut across the different policy areas. The directorate where I work is the Center for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities, and tries to connect different policy domains with the aim of organizing policy actions by challenges rather than sector. So, it is exactly reflecting what the geography of higher education is doing; connecting the higher education policy agenda with that of regional development, with that of industrial policy, and with that of innovation, of course.

AU: Now, within the geography of higher education project, there’s a more specific Offshoot, that’s the EECOLE, the Entrepreneurship, Education, Collaboration and Engagement Network, and that’s the project you’re connected with and the project you’ll be leading a roundtable on here in Toronto at the end of November. What’s the specific mission of this network within the Geography of Higher Education project?

RT: Thank you. It’s actually a call that encompasses the geography of education. The story goes that we were working on two different strands of activities. One was the geography of education and the other was more on entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial skills, and entrepreneurial education. Soon we realized that the two were strongly connected and that you can call the geography of our education basically entrepreneurial ecosystems. So, we decided to operate these activities into a single platform that is EECOLE. Now, EECOLE aims to leverage on entrepreneurial higher education institutions to promote regional development, innovation and sustainability. We aim to create policy synergies starting from higher education policy. Because we can speak different policy languages, we want to create these complementarities.

AU: I want to talk about how collaboration and engagement between universities and communities actually works in the real world. Specifically, around issues around regional development and sustainability. It seems to me that particularly in North America, I can’t speak as closely to Europe, is that community engagement and collaboration is usually driven from the bottom up. So, within universities, it’s individual researchers who go out and find ways to collaborate rather than the university as an institution going out and making the connection, right? That more top down side. In the kind of work that you look at, who is doing the engagement for the university side. Is it the individual or is it the institution? And maybe a better question is, does it matter who with the institution is doing it?

RT: Yeah, it actually does, I think, because it is true. This is a common pattern that we have observed everywhere in OECD where we have worked. The idea of engagement and collaboration is often an individual endeavor and this is partly because of the freedom that academics enjoy. Some higher education institutions have developed more activities, but it’s rare to find higher education institutions that are able to engage and collaborate on an institutional basis. The problem that I have with the individual engagement versus the institutional one is continuity, capabilities, trust-building. It’s often the case that a researcher can have some funds that finances specific process for project for collaboration, and then for a couple of years, they are able to accompany a community and then it goes out when the funds are over. This is a problem because negatively affected the trust of the people towards the institution, not only the individual. So, it hampers the possibility to generate collaborations over the long term. I don’t know if we can follow up to this question because there is a kind of a contradiction that I can see throughout the international experiences that we have done; since there is this request for more collaboration but the focus is always on research and excellent research, and this is a weird idiosyncrasy, if you want.

AU: Well, let me ask you the question then, that is an interesting point because it suggests that the universities want to lead the collaboration and that the research is the important thing because that’s an important outcome to them. That’s not necessarily the important outcome to the community, is it? It’s nice, but it’s not necessarily what they’re looking for. So, are you suggesting maybe that there’s an imbalance here that universities want this collaboration more than the regions do?

RT: No, I wouldn’t say that, in the sense that I think that universities naturally prefer probably teaching and research if I have to say that, but it is true that there is an increasing pressure for societal value. There’s public scrutiny actually about the capacity of higher education institutions to produce societal value. And on the other hand, as I said, the focus is on research. So, there is a bit of this connecting in the agenda. What is true is that collaboration activities can be done and implemented through teaching activities through research activities and, of course, through collaboration, but it is important that the university develops capabilities, and that has a leadership that engages with the agenda of collaboration, and that some incentives are put on the table. Otherwise, it’s as I said before, it is difficult to have a meaningful relationship with external stakeholders.

AU: You’ve looked at different patterns of university community engagement around the world and the different things or the subjects that the that the collaborations are organized around or the roles of the different participants. Are there a handful of distinct types of collaboration you see around the world? Are there some kinds of engagement that are more common than others?

RT: The agenda of collaboration is a dynamic one. In a sense, it evolves over time. At the beginning, there was technology transfer. And so, it was patents and the idea was to put a patent on the border of the fences of the higher education institution and someone from the business community was going to collect that and that’s it. Then when innovation and collaboration became more complex and more elaborate. Then we started to see the spin off, the start-ups, this increasing idea of entrepreneurship that in any case influenced also the collaboration agenda because entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial activities make the higher education institutions a bit more osmotic and porous with their external communities. Then there is there is also, you know, an interesting pattern that is emerging about SDGs. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are another interesting platform that is facilitating collaboration between higher education institutions and other stakeholders. But again, one important variable is space, is communities. This is probably more visible in North America when you discuss land grant universities or also in Canada with the University of Quebec, there is a clear mission to help communities or surrounding communities. While the idea of the third mission in Europe promotes a collaboration that the university like to think is global or is international but diluted a bit to the interaction with the surrounding community. At least this is the idea that I would I would suggest.

AU: That’s interesting. When we were in a meeting in New York together a few months ago, it did strike me that there were some pretty clear differences between the way North American participants conceptualized community and who it was they were supposed to be speaking with and the European one. I’m intrigued. Is the notion of tech transfer and outreach that comes from a mixture of the Morrill acts in the 1860s and the Bayh-Dole Act in the seventies and eighties in the United States. How different is that from the third mission? I mean, that’s a term you hear a lot in Europe and you don’t hear it in North America. Is it just a spatial difference that the third mission is not necessarily rooted to a particular region in Europe, or is there something deeper there too about the way they think about their responsibility to the external community?

RT: I would say that there is already, first of all, it is already important that to have the third mission there, because as I said, there is teaching, research and collaboration. Now, there is a certain cultural evolution in that, because in countries like Sweden, for instance, they really don’t like the word “third mission”. They actually prefer “social engagement” or “social value.” This helps them to have, I think, better cooperation with the communities. The third mission in general is considered to be a global playground, international playground, at least for from many universities. This could be a problem. And then there is also a semantic issue because the third mission comes after the first and the second. So, it is a bit marginal compared to the others. This is another problem. For instance, with Italy, we have a project now with them. There is the search of and desperate search of another wording and the Italians are considering a “knowledge exchange and collaboration”, “societal impact”. In the UK, they prefer now this concept of the “civic university” rather than “third mission.” So, this is a trend that I can see everywhere. And I think that will deliver a better capacity to connect with communities.

AU: Raffaele, we’ve been talking for the most part about universities, but it takes two to tango, right? If you’re going to have engagement, there needs to be someone on the other side of the table. Who is sitting on the other side of the table, particularly when it comes to regional engagement and sustainable development? Who are the partners that institutions choose? And is it different in North America than Europe?

RT: It might be different in a sense that there are places in Europe in which… let’s think about communities for instance. So, we were on a field visit in England and Wales a few days ago. There, as I said, there is this strong agenda for cooperation. There is the civic university, but this idea of cooperation is kind of negatively affected by the reform of the multi-level governance system that is happening in the UK, because they are changing the structure of city regions. So, universities in this moment are dancing. I don’t want to say they are dancing alone, but it is difficult for them to understand with whom they should dance. So, this is an interesting question also because it is not a linear one in the sense of business. Of course, it can be a partner for universities, but it’s a partner that is sometimes difficult to handle because universities do not like to cooperate with SMEs. Although it would be very important because it is complicated. There is no institutional capacity on the other side. On the other hand, large companies cooperate with universities, mostly for talent, to absorb talent. So, it is not a big achievement that so I would say that the ideal collaboration would be, not a tango, but a group of ballet in which you know there is several stakeholders and above all, the universities are not the center of the ecosystem are part of the dancing crew. They understand that to cooperate. They have also to develop capabilities, open doors and accept to get a bit dirty. So, it is it is an interesting an interesting argument, but is complex and as I said, there are several factors contributing to this complexity, including the governance, the productive sector in the ecosystem, the way in which the region or the subnational level is organized, lots of complexity.

AU: The problem with complexity is that then the institutional capacity to deal with that complexity becomes a pretty key factor in whether or not they can work productively with the regional ecosystem. So, the size of the institution is the most obvious one. Big institutions are going to have more resources to throw at collaboration than small one. Do you think there are specific steps that universities can take to raise their capacity for external collaboration?

RT: Yes, actually I do, in the sense that there are several examples that we saw. First of all, you are right. Size is important. But leadership is important, too. Also in some cases, you know, the will of cooperation is the most important thing. In this sense, we have seen this very good practice at a relatively small university in Sweden, that is Karlstad in Varmland, and they because of the capacity of collaboration between the regional government and the university. They created an academy for smart specialization which is within the university is like a department of the university and is engineered to plug into the smart specialization of the region and to generate knowledge products for that smart specialization and to support talent creation of for development policy of the of the region. But there are also other solutions that are eclectic in the sense that, for instance, the SBDC, the Small Business Development Center in the U. S., some of them are within universities, they give access to SMEs and entrepreneurs to the resources and the research capabilities of universities, but they are not necessarily academic people. So, it is an infrastructure that is filling the gap. And this infrastructure is on the blurred border of academia. Which is interesting because then you can fill this gap with the resources that belong to other policies but that connect well with higher education institutions and policy.

AU: On the flip side, what happens when the university’s ability or desire to collaborate exceeds that of the community’s desire to absorb knowledge. Like I could see that in a lot of small and medium sized towns depending on the pattern of local industry, maybe politics or ideology, sometimes the receptor capacity of a community is very low. What is the university supposed to do when the talents of its staff on things like research and sustainable development and those kinds of things exceed the capacity of the community to accept it?

RT: That’s a key point and helps me to clarify a fundamental issue. We don’t want to transform universities in regional development, this is not their work. For instance, when we discuss about the capacity of university to interact with their communities, we prefer to use place-responsiveness instead of place-based approach, because we recognize that it is important to have an international dimension. The other point is that EECOLE is not a network of universities. We prefer to use the word higher education institutions to clarify that we are also considering like the ISCED 5 level institutions, so the community colleges, the post-secondary institutions that are perhaps better when you are a rural small community because of capacity because of the ecosystem because of the immediate need of skills. But even in that case, when you are a community college and you are designed actually to respond to the needs of your productive sector; if the productive sector cannot identify the skills needs because of you are acting in an impoverished region, for instance, in the south of Italy, where I come from, then it would be too much to ask to that community college to identify the skills and the demand and the supply of skills at the same time. So, we need to be realistic. There are some limits to our approach. Our approach can support better regional development, better innovation policies that have special lenses, but EECOLE cannot solve all of the problems of the interactions between higher education institutions and communities.

AU: So let me ask you, so you’ve got some really interesting examples. What’s the bottleneck to creating more of those? What would it take to see more of those kinds of engagement, kinds of relationships to produce them at scale across the OECD?

RT: Well, I think that a first important point is to reduce idiosyncrasies. In a sense that or if you want symmetrically to increase complementarities, because as I said before, there is a push towards this idea of engagement with a desirable value generated by higher education institutions and at the same time all the indicators to evaluate it’s all based on excellent research that can create dichotomies in the agenda of higher education institutions. So, already removing, at least clarifying, these contradictions would be useful. Then it might be possible in some cases to generate more organizational capacity to generate The active institutions and in careers that facilitate the cooperation of universities. But again, it’s not the only solution. As I said with the SBDC, there is the possibility also to put in the academic community some extra people with specific skills. The important is that they understand each other, that they all speak the same language in order to have a homogeneous community. Then perhaps, and I again, I repeat myself, but a promising tool is this idea of the sustainable development goals of the UN because they offer plain language to different people, different stakeholders, KPIs, it’s a metric indicator of result. So, it is possible to use also new tools to facilitate the collaboration agenda between higher education institutions and their territories. But the most important thing is the political will and the knowledge that as Gramsci, the Italian philosopher was saying the old is dying and the new struggle to be born. Now, we should recognize that we in live very different, difficult time times. And so, universities could play a role in helping the transition, generating leadership, including at the community level, and help us to look after each other. I want to think in this way.

AU: Well, that’s all the time we have for today. Raffaele, thank you very much for joining us.

RT: Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners, for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for the show, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be Marian Lloyd. She’s a higher education researcher at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, and she’ll be joining us to talk about that institution’s unique form of rectoral elections, which are coming to a head in early November. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.